


Revelations

by ishafel



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-30
Updated: 2011-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-28 11:29:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/307420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A pale horse and a dark quickening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revelations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fuzzytale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuzzytale/gifts).



The gray mare came as part of a ransom-- one of thirty traded for a chieftain's son Methos had taken on a raid. They were a fortune, and nothing. Thirty horses was more than many kings could have spared. But these were old, or very young, or lame, or thin and full of worms. It was a sign of disrespect, a ransom paid so-- disrespect or poverty. Kronos was furious, but in the end it didn't matter. Methos and Silas had grown bored with keeping watch over the boy, and had butchered him. There was nothing left to send to the father but his head.

Winter was coming, and they were preparing to move south. Kronos ordered the new horses killed, and the meat smoked. They were not worth the trouble of moving, or the expense of feeding. Slaughter was Caspian's job, and he was very nearly done when Methos stopped him.

There were three yearling fillies huddled together in the corner of the paddock. Two bays and a gray, the best of the thirty: they were miserably thin, but with clean straight legs and pretty heads.

“The bays, perhaps,” Caspian sneered. “But everyone knows that pale horses are bad fortune.”

Had anyone else said it, Methos might have agreed, or at least let it go. Because it was Caspian, he snorted and spat at the other man's feet. Caspian hit him hard enough to send him to the ground. Methos rolled and came up with a blade in his hand and before Caspian could draw Methos had laid his face open from the corner of his eye to the edge of his mouth.

This time it was Caspian who fell, and Methos on top of him. Kronos came over and kicked them apart. “You are like a mad dog,” he said to Methos. “Five minutes, I had my back turned, and in five more you would have been fucking his corpse in the dirt for all the slaves to see.”

Caspian held the remains of his shirt to his ruined face. Methos rubbed cracked ribs and said nothing. But the gray horse lived.

Over the winter, one of the two bays died, and Silas made a pet of the other, feeding her handfuls of dry grass, crushed oats from their precious stores. The gray was more cautious, or less friendly, and would not take feed from his hand.

“She is wild, that one,” Silas said when she shied away, and forgot about her.

Methos, watching, saw more in her. She ate the oats the bay filly dropped, and the hay the riding horses left unfinished. She began, slowly, to fill out: her chest was broad, her shoulder sloping, her back strong. Only her eyes were fierce and wicked as an eagle's, eager for the sight of blood.

“She will make a war-horse,” he said, and Silas did not disagree. Between them they drove her into a small, deep ravine not far from the camp and piled brush around the mouth of it. For two days Methos left her there, without food or water.

On the third day he offered her water only, from a big clay pot. She came to him unafraid and drank from it, and then she struck it from his hand with her unshod hoof and snorted at him, as if to warn him that she was not submitting so easily. Methos held out a hand to her and she pinned her ears and moved away.

From that day she got no food and no water, but what she would take from his hand-- and he was there every day to offer it. Kronos and Caspian went raiding, but Methos stayed behind and fed her wisps of hay.

“You are changed, brother,” Kronos said when he came back and found Methos sitting on the frozen ground, waiting for the mare to come closer. “There was a time when you would have slit that brute's throat rather than look at it.”

He marveled as he said it, because Kronos had thought for some time that there was nothing left in Methos of patience or thought, nothing but a certain vicious cunning that a cornered animal might manage. He had thought that the time was coming that Methos, too, might be better put down, as so often happened with very old Immortals. And he had been sorry, and afraid, because they had been something like friends once, and because Methos was going to be a difficult man to destroy.

Now, watching the gray mare lower her head and sniff at Methos' outstretched hands, he dared to hope he had been wrong. That there was more for them than death, and death, and death, so many Quickenings that in the end nothing was left of who they had been but a handful of lightning and headless corpse.

“A good horse is worth a hundred shields,” Methos said, but he did not meet Kronos's eyes, saying it. His attention was on the mare, as it should have been; she snorted at the grass he held and, quick as a striking snake, flung a front foot at him. Methos rolled away; she stepped back. If they had both been men, they might have raised their blades in salute before they began again.

Kronos turned away and left them to it. They would be moving camp soon, following the spring north, and there were so many things that could not be left to Caspian or Silas. It was more than Methos's friendship, or his sword arm, that Kronos missed.

When they rode this time, Silas was on the little bay mare. She had grown lovely: her eye was kind and her neck arched, and she came to his whistle. Methos had got a halter on the gray, and she pranced beside his gelding, going first too quickly and then too slow, so that the rope burned his fingers and he swore.

“Ill- luck,” Caspian muttered, and did not laugh as he ordinarily would have. He had been raised among the tribes in the north, and had never outgrown their superstitions, but though Methos did not acknowledge his words Kronos knew that Caspian was far from the only one who said them, or believed them.

For the gray filly, born brown, had dappled over the winter and her summer coat was almost white, only her legs and mane and tail showing hints of her original color. Pale horses were put to death in the grasslands, and in the cities east the province of kings alone. Methos was no fool, and no king, but it would have been cleverer and luckier to bleed her under the full moon than to try and ride her.

No one but an Immortal could have done it. The first day he sat on her she broke his back, and in the first week she killed him three times. She came when he whistled now, but sometimes she ate from his hand and sometimes she went for him with her teeth bared. Spring faded into summer and Methos rode the chestnut when they fought, and all along the river villages burned and men died and women wept.

“The bay of Silas's is shaping well,” Kronos said to Methos one day, as they watched Caspian and the pre-Immortal boy he'd found. “You have a good eye.” He wasn't sure what he expected, but Methos only grunted. “They were good horses, better than they looked.”

Methos's head turned at that, and for what felt like first time in a long time he actually met Kronos's eyes.

“Teacher--,” Kronos began.

Methos flinched. “No,” he said. “No.”

It was the closest they'd come to a conversation in three years, and it was nothing. Kronos let it go. “We should finish here,” he said, moving to pull Caspian away from his prize. Methos would have been the one to give the orders, once; now he sat passive on his chestnut and waited, nothing left of him but killing-- and the gray.

It was late summer before he rode the mare on a raid, and even then if it had been anyone else on her Kronos would have forbidden it. She would not stay in place as they waited, spinning, half-rearing, so that Methos was forced to keep her moving in restless circles. She did not scream, at least. If she had he would have slit her throat himself, and fought Methos if he'd had to.

When he finally gave the signal, they galloped down into the sleeping town with swords drawn, and the gray mare was at the very front. Runaway, Kronos thought, all Caspian's predictions of bad luck come true. But when he urged his own horse forward he saw that Methos was crouched over her neck, his fingers tangled in her mane, the rein loose. She was not taking him anywhere he did not want to go.

His teacher had been a wise man, who never risked his head when there were others to do the fighting. “Think,” he had said to Kronos from the first. “You must always think.” And Kronos had come to see that he was right about all of it, that there was a reason he was the oldest Immortal Kronos had ever met.

The thing on the gray mare was not Kronos's teacher, or his friend. He was one of the monsters Methos had mocked, once. Even Caspian, even Silas, had more sense. In the north, pale horses were dangerous, and in the east they were the mark of kings. To the south lay the end of the world. Kronos had come from the west.

And in the west, they said that when Death came for you, he came on a red-eyed white horse, with a sword the color of fire. He did not believe in Death-- in any of the gods who had been the borders of the world when he was young-- but even Kronos knew that the gray mare meant the end of something.

All that year, and the next, and the next after, he followed her to war. Methos led them now, as had until three years before, but this time they took no hostages and left nothing but ashes. And they won, always they won, because Methos was a madman and later because the people they fought would not stand and face the thing on the pale horse.

Kronos, who had wanted nothing more than to be Methos's second again, Kronos who wanted to be led by better men, Kronos who had had three years of making decisions while Methos stared blankly at the ground-- Kronos was afraid of Methos, and afraid of the end of the world, and afraid of the gray mare who had begun it. “She is a demon,” Caspian said, and his voice trembled, and even Silas who thought every animal he saw was a friend did not contradict him.

They burned the villages of the grasslands and the cities to the west and the forts at the mountains' edge, and everything in between. Two horses died under Caspian and one each under Kronos and Silas, and still the gray carried Methos, her neck proud and her ears back, as heartless as her master.

When there was nothing left to destroy they rode south to the sea, and still there was nothing but blue water and white sand and the mare, diving at birds because there were no children to kill. Methos rode her across the beach and into the ocean, so that the waves crashed against her knees. And then he sat, staring out at the horizon. Once Caspian would have complained, or even Silas, and Methos would have snapped at them; once there might have been blood drawn, but now they did not dare to question him.

At last Kronos kicked his horse into the water, and rode it as near to Methos and the gray as it would go. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to-- after a moment, Methos turned his head and looked at Kronos, and said, “Enough.” And for the first time in years, there was someone there, someone Kronos recognized, someone he had loved.

“Come on,” he said, as if to an invalid, or a man returning from a great journey. “There is nothing here for us.”

“No,” Methos agreed, and gathered the mare's reins, and she bent her neck to look back at him and Kronos saw that her eyes were soft and dark as an ordinary horse's. Not an ending, but a beginning, he thought, and not bad luck but only different. And this time, where Methos led he followed gladly.


End file.
